The present invention relates to visually encoding data and analyzing an associated dataset. More specifically, the invention relates to encoding a dynamic dataset and supporting data exploration of the dynamic dataset.
Datasets can be represented in the form of a graph, as a collection of nodes connected together by edges. The graph may be in different forms, such as multi-modal, multi-relational, and/or multivariate. The graph is considered multi-modal when it includes multiple types of nodes. Similarly, the graph may be considered multi-relational when the nodes in the graph can be connected together using different types of edges, and the graph may be considered multivariate when each node and/or each edge is characterized by multiple attributes.
A visual rendition of the graph may be presented to visually depict an understanding of general patterns, trends, and features in the graph data. For example, the graph data may be presented as a collection of points, representing the nodes, connected by lines, representing the edges. This rendition may be effective for relatively small and/or static datasets, but becomes confusing and complex for larger datasets, as well as dynamic datasets.